Ricerc@Sapienza

Scintillations affect the propagated signal with an unwanted aleatory oscillation at the receiver. A first analysis of data acquired from Alphasat Q-band receiver station, located in Spino d'Adda (Italy), is performed. Correlation between meteorological measurements at the ground and measured scintillation from the Q-band beacon receiver (i.e., fluctuation of the received electromagnetic field) is investigated. Radiosounding data from north Italy station of "Milano Linate" have been collected for the entire year 2015 and used to calculate the refractive index structure constant.

This paper aims at improving and assessing a previously developed technique to predict data volume transfer during deep-space satellite communication links at Ka- and $X$ -band (where the Earth's atmosphere affects propagating signals). The proposed technique exploits a weather forecast (WF) model to predict the atmospheric state and a radiative transfer model to convert the atmospheric state into radiopropagation variables. The latter are used to design the link budget and to maximize transferred data-volume.